ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses life history of Luce Irigaray who is a contemporary French philosopher, psychoanalyst, and feminist theorist. Best known for her conception of sexual difference as the occlusion of difference, her work challenges the sameness of a Western sexual order that reflects only the perspectives and interests of men. Irigaray's antifoundationalist approach to sexual difference is exemplified in her first major book, Speculum of the Other Woman, published in French in 1974. In Speculum, Irigaray repeats, disrupts, and mimetically inverts the story of Western philosophy, beginning with Freud and ending with Plato. Ultimately her sexuate difference aims to transform otherness into a new ethics and a new relational ontology. The rethinking of phallogocentrism in Irigaray's work not only challenges the current linguistic, ethical, and political order; more radically, it aims to reconfigure the form-matter relation at the heart of Western metaphysics.
